The next chapter in the Dirty Foot Mud Adventures Saga will play out before the Polk County Planning Commission Wednesday morning. Either w ay it goes, it will probably end up before the County Commission.

This case involves a request for a permit for a facility that will include an off-road drag strips for various kinds of ATVs, mud pits and a course for runners, ATV and dirt bike enthusiasts on 1,150 acres in a rural area between Frostproof and Fort Meade off Avon Park Cutoff Road.

The project originally won approval in 2011 for an 82-acre facility, but later that year county officials forced the owners to shut down after the facility expanded into the surrounding land without permits and generated noise complaints. They were told to resubmit for a permit that reflected what they were actually planning to do.

The case came back to the Planning Commission in December. Neighbors opposed the permit because they didn’t feel like having their rural peace and quiet disturbed.

Dirty Foot’s proposal has drawn support from people outside the neighborhood who either sell ATVs or like to ride them. Letters of support in the backup packet are from Orlando, Sarasota, Boca Raton, Lehigh Acres and other distant locations from which enthusiasts might visit Dirty Foot Adventures if its permit is approved.

The reason this case wasn’t decided in December was because David Theriaque, a Tallahassee land-use lawyer representing the neighbors, pointed out that Polk’s growth plan doesn’t allow these kinds of recreational activities in Agricultural/Rural Residential areas.

Polk County’s response has been to revise its growth plan to allow recreational uses, which planners said were implicitly allowed anyway even though that’s not what the plan said. That revision has not been completed.

The still unanswered question is, given Theriaque’s revelation, whether the original approval was valid and whether this case involves an application for a use rather than simply a modification of an existing approved use.

Also, it seems likely any approval Dirty Foot might obtain may still be contingent on final approval of the growth plan revisions, which is still months away.

This case is interesting because it’s the second instance in recent times where a noisy commercial recreational use was approved by Polk County only have the results blow up in their faces later.

I’m referring to the 2009 approval of Captain Fred’s Airboat Tours at Lake Rosalie Marina over the objections of neighbors.

Eventually, the local protests forced the marina’s owner to end the arrangement, I learned later.

It wasn’t long before Captain Fred’s Airboat Tours began operating out of a commercial site on Lake Hamilton.

Lakefront homeowners on Lake Hamiton have complained to the County Commission and anyone else they think could do something about the sudden disturbance of their lakefront peace and quiet to no avail.

You see, the business is located inside the city limits of Lake Hamilton, which has no regulations that govern such thing. The County Commission has no jurisdiction inside cities in cases like this,.

As a result, the business will likely continue as long as there are paying customers.

If Dirty Foot Adventures’ permit is approved, no one could blame its owners for doing the same thing because that’s the how the private free enterprise system works.

That’s where the county’s development review process comes into play in deciding whether the project as proposed is really a good idea. The revised regulations say recreational uses may be allowed, not that they must be. It should be an interesting discussion.